On July 4, 2019, The Washington Times posted an article detailing some of the arguments then Senator Joe Biden made against giving refuge to South Vietnamese fleeing to America. The statement simply does not line up with statements and claims that the former Vice-President is currently making.
The article reports:
Democratic presidential front-runner Joseph R. Biden, who has denounced President Trump’s efforts against Central American asylum-seekers, vigorously opposed resettling as refugees South Vietnamese who had helped the U.S. during the war.
The Washington Examiner reported Thursday, citing records from the administration of President Gerald R. Ford, that as a U.S. senator, Mr. Biden tried to deny refuge to hundreds of thousands fleeing the imminent North Vietnamese victory and likely Communist persecution.
Mr. Biden’s arguments about refugees reverse what he and other Democrats now insist are the only moral stances, saying that the U.S. had “no obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals,” the Examiner reported.
Certainly the need to provide asylum at that time was critical. Anyone even accused of helping America or siding with America was going to be executed as soon as the communists took over South Vietnam.
The article continues:
“The United States has no obligation to evacuate one — or 100,001 — South Vietnamese,” Mr. Biden said then.
In an April 1975 meeting at the White House with Ford and several of his top foreign-policy officials including Henry Kissinger, Mr. Biden said he would not vote to fund evacuation of non-Americans.
The article concludes:
“I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out,” Mr. Biden said, speaking two weeks before the fall of Saigon.
This angered Ford, calling such a refusal a betrayal of American values in terms similar to what Democrats say about Mr. Trump in 2019.
“We opened our door to the Hungarians. … Our tradition is to welcome the oppressed,” Ford said.
In a Miami Herald op-ed column last month, Mr. Biden called the Trump administration’s efforts to keep out or discourage asylum seekers at the border, “actions that subvert American values.”
Mr. Biden didn’t get his way on opening American doors to endangered South Vietnamese.
He was one of only three Foreign Relations panel members to vote against Ford’s funding request and one of just 14 to do so on the Senate floor.
More than 130,000 South Vietnamese fleeing the victorious Communists were eventually evacuated and granted refuge in the U.S.
I guess then Senator Biden figured the Vietnamese wouldn’t vote Democrat.